Pirates of the Spanish Main?

By Jeremiah So I don't know how this slipped by my radar, but in late august Wizkids snuck out their reboot of the Pirates of the Spanish Main, in the form of a card game.

The original version of the Pirates franchise was based on the construction of tiny little pirate ships and setting up your entire table as the board on which you played. Many of those ships are still setting sail atop my monitor, even as I type! It is truly one of my all time favorites in the world of "dead games".

The new game hit stores in late August/early September, and unfortunately for the Pirates: OTSM franchise, hasn't seemed to make a big splash. The game play is advertised as  a secret bid system, where players play cards to help your sponsored captains achieve success without letting everyone know who you are secretly sponsoring. The cards feature artwork from the many releases of the original.

So, has anyone played this? Why didn't you tell me about it? Let us know what you think!

Thanks for reading!

Dead Games - Pt. 2: Star Trek

[By Jeremiah]

So, this is kind of an odd game for me to be playing. I'm really not that big of a Star Trek fan, in fact, I'm a borderline hater. But a few of my gaming buddies wanted to get into the game, so I said, "Yeah, I'll go along with that." And when I say my friends wanted to get into the game, I mean, like a year ago nearly 15 years after the first series was printed, and several years after the last expansion of the Second Edition went to press. In my honest opinion, the best time to get into a CCG is well after the corpse is cold. 99% of dead games will have the bottom drop out on their value and you can buy boxes of starters and boosters for pennies on the dollar!

Stick with the First Edition - We play the first edition base set, along with the first expansion, mostly because it's super cheap to get into, (Alternate Universe - Booster boxes are like $10, If you look around on the internet.) but let me tell you, this game has problems. Decipher seems to have rushed it to market really fast. The biggest glaring problem to me is that there is no cost to play your cards. If you have a hand filled with heavy hitting crew members, ships, and equipment, you can lay 'em all down in one turn! Yep, just slap 'em down and start running missions! The gameplay is decent, but I have to be honest, I think we've done a fair job of butchering the rules.

Gameplay - So the game play looks something like this - During setup players take turns placing missions into the "space line" or "star line" basically in a big line across the table (you'll need a decent-sized table), then players take turns loading up these missions with "Dilemma" cards or "Artifact" cards. Dilemmas are just that, a dilemma your away team must face and resolve before completing the mission (mostly just by sitting around and talking about it - ok, that's not entirely true, just my dig on Star Trek); if you combo these up well, you can really throw a wrench in your opponents' works. Artifacts are items you find when you complete a mission, and they usually are helpful trinkets to add to your inventory.

It's Your Turn - On a turn players can play every stinking card in their hand if they want to, put them on a ship and then move the ship a certain distance along the space line thingy. Each mission card on the line has a distance value which determines your movement. If you choose to do a mission you must face and resolve all of the dilemmas, and then complete the mission - the mission usually consists of having a certain amount of abilities in your away team. (Each character card has a list of skills/abilities/attributes possessed by that particular character.) If your away team meets that criteria, you complete the mission and score the points for it. Yay. If not you have to wait until your next turn, wondering why you attempted the mission in the first place.

What Do I Think of it? - It's not the best CCG I've played, but it's not the worst either, as the expansions continued to hit the market Decipher made attempts to ratify the gaping holes in the game by adding card types and rules to the system. I don't think they ever got it to where they felt the game should be, so they released the Second Edition which revamped the game entirely.

If you're a big Star Trek the Next Generation fan, first I apologize for the smart remarks, and second it's worth spending $20-$30 and getting 2-3 boxes, keeping it around and seeing what kind of cool/funny/off the wall decks you can build with it. And if you get a "Future Enterprise" in an Alternate Universe box, you can still fetch about $30 on eBay for it and make your money back!

Amazon Has Star Trek CCG Right HERE!

To Be Continued...

We've had a great first month of blogetty blogging here at TOG, and we wanted to take a second and say thanks to all of you who have read, shared, liked, retweeted, and commented on our posts here on the blog, as well as our other social media outlets! We sincerely appreciate it, and humbly ask for your continued support! We also thought we'd take a few seconds and give you a sneak peek at what we've got planned for month 2!

So here we go!

We've received a handful of review copies for some games, and we'll be reviewing those soon!

Walls of Light

Glory to Rome

and soon Zombie in my Pocket!

We'll also be reviewing some classics and new games:

Fluxx

Bang!

Mage Knight and more!

And look for our interview with Heartland Hauling Company's designer Jason Kotarski!

All that plus more news, deep thoughts and we'll talk more about our favorite dead CCGs too!

Thanks again for all your support! See you next week!

Uuurrrnnggg... Dead Games, the fad of the 90's

1993 changed gaming as we know it, at least for a decade or so. Wizards of the Coast released the first "Alpha" series of Magic the Gathering, the first collectible card game. Heretofore card games on the market pretty much consisted of games played with a pinochle, or poker deck, or if you were really progressive you were playing Milles Bornes and Uno.

Magic the Gathering (MTG) introduced an entirely new gaming experience, and subsequently an whole new wooorrlld, of games that followed suit. The concept was quite ingenious, instead of having an out of the box game playing experience players could now customize their own deck of cards, and pit them against other players, and in the meantime chase down highly sought after cards that would make your opponent tremble in fear when it was thrown on the table. It caught on, and BIG, MTG is still thriving and new sets are being released regularly, with just about every gaming store in existence holding monthly if not weekly tournaments.

Because of the wild success of MTG, the entire gaming universe jumped on the collectible card game (CCG) band wagon, new gaming publishers sprouted up, and nearly EVERYTHING was turned into some form of a CCG.

What I'm about to say might be the most shocking thing you've ever heard. I have never played Magic the Gathering. I know, I should hand in my Geek Card. But I never got past the eerie and hostile nature of the majority of the cards (particularly the Black and Red cards).

I did however play my fair share of CCGs that showed up on the scene, all of which are now commonly referred to as "Dead Games." There are many I still dust off and enjoy playing from time to time, and others that, while I don't play them anymore, still hold a special place in my heart. Over the next several weeks, Firestone and I will be revisiting these games. Join us as we take this trip down memory lane and look at the games that time forgot, we'll look at the good, the bad, and those that shall not be named.